Reid Estreicher

Disruption.
A word commonly used in the tech world that carries a positive connotation
regarding the change in status quo. Fail Fast. An expression commonly used in
the tech world that embraces failure as a guiding direction, allowing
navigation towards success. Pivot. Yet another word commonly used to describe a
change in business direction, usually followed by Fail Fast. The above-mentioned
have been used for years to help encourage risk-taking and spur innovation but
it’s been used as a directive from leadership in organizations that focus on
such things. Now, globally, companies are being forced to do so without first
having the opportunity to prepare themselves for such a journey. Disruption, in
this case, is seemingly terrible. Even moreso, it’s nearly impossible to Fail
Fast if you weren’t prepared and never planned for a secondary or even tertiary
strategy. It just feels like failure. So, how do you pivot and in what
direction do you do so?

Many
companies are now struggling with a directive that forces employees to work
remotely when there was not a cohesive plan in place to execute this and there
are many items that need to be addressed before being able to do this well. How
do your employees remote into a secure connection to transmit sensitive company
data? Should everyone have the same access once they do remote in? What’s the
best physical setup for an employee to work from home? How do you manage BYOD
devices? What do you do about external threats? How do you protect company
data? How do you protect against internal data exfiltration? This could all
seem very daunting if you’ve never before looked into these topics but there
are specific steps you can take to deliver a comprehensive and safe work from
home solution.

According
to the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) and the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST), guidelines have already been established. And
while the Guide to Enterprise
Telework and Remote Access Security was created nearly a decade ago, these standards still hold true
today. Any business can use this guidance as a roadmap to getting their
workforce fully functioning while remotely deployed. This publication covers
various topics of the remote working environments and remote access, such as
VPN, Remote Desktop, Virtual Machines, Authentication, Access Control, Client
Device Security, Data Encryption and a summary of recommendations per topic.
Failing isn’t foreign to
anyone or any company and it’s never a bad thing as long as we use it as a
teaching moment, treating it like a tuition payment for future preparedness.
Collectively, we can use our failures and misses to push us towards a picture
of what success should be. Ultimately, if you’re certain of where you don’t
want to be then you’ll have a better idea of where you want to end up.